Drake may have been onto something when he rapped “f**k a fake friend, where your real friends at?” According to a new study by Tel Aviv University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, only half of the people we call friends would reciprocate the notion.

“It turns out that we’re very bad at judging who our friends are,” says Tel Aviv University’s Dr. Erez Shmueli. “And our difficulty determining the reciprocity of friendship significantly limits our ability to engage in cooperative arrangements. We learned that we can’t rely on our instincts or intuition. There must be an objective way to measure these relationships and quantify their impact.”

The joint study involved social experiments and analysis of data from other studies to determine the percentage of reciprocal friendships. Researchers developed an algorithm that was able to divide friendships into two categories: unidirectional or reciprocal.

“We found that 95 percent of participants thought that their relationships were reciprocal,” says Dr. Shmueli. “If you think someone is your friend, you expect him to feel the same way. But in fact that’s not the case – only 50 percent of those polled matched up in the bidirectional friendship category.”

Awkward.

So why did these researchers focus on friendship? It wasn’t just to make you paranoid.

“Reciprocal relationships are important because of social influence,” says Dr. Shmueli. “In this experiment that analyzes different incentives for exercising, we found that friendship pressure far outweighed money in terms of motivation. We found, not surprisingly, that those pressured by reciprocal friends exercised more and enjoyed greater progress than those with unilateral friendship ties.”

You’ll find Leia running through the six with her feminist woes. The co-editor of TheFeminismProject.com has been in Toronto since 2012, after re-locating from the west coast of Canada. Leia’s passion for words translated into a career after she completed a political science degree from the University of Victoria and scored a gig writing for a local magazine. Inspired by her new calling she decided to do the Master of Arts in Journalism program at Western University and was on her way to becoming an underpaid journalist.
She has contributed to publications and TV programs across Canada including The London Free Press, CTV British Columba, TheLoop.ca, TheHollywoodMag.com, and currently she works at The Shopping Channel where you can see her hawking vacuums.
When she’s not on the screen (or in front of it), she’s spoiling her fur babies and is one-half of an interracial couple whose goal is to try every single charcuterie board in the city.
Now she’s all about her new baby, TheFeminismProject.com!